Just six months ago, the 1,400-acre plot of land in the Town of Clay was a swampy forest. Now, it is a flat, sprawling expanse of dirt and rock, buzzing with heavy machinery.
On Thursday, national and statewide leaders gathered alongside executives from Micron Technology to witness the very first pouring of concrete for what will become a massive semiconductor manufacturing campus.
The milestone comes as Micron announced a massive scaling up of its plans to investment in the United States, adding $50 billion to its initial $200 billion pool.
To meet an expedited construction schedule, contractors have been working on-site from dusk until dawn, with crews active from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM.
“We have 200 trucks moving around every day to try and accelerate the project to get us to this moment,” said Manish Bhatia, Micron’s Executive Vice President of Global Operations. He noted, more than 80% of the on-site construction workers are New York residents, and they're ahead of schedule.
At its peak, the project is expected to employ 4,500 construction workers. For U.S. Rep. John Mannion, the reliance on local labor is a victory.
“These are good union jobs,” Mannion said. “We are a union town. We are a union region. And we know that when our brothers and sisters in labor do the work, great things happen.”
The sheer volume of materials required just for the foundation highlights the unprecedented scale of the project.
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra estimates that just for the foundation, crews will pour more than 300,000 cubic yards of concrete. That's enough to build roughly four Empire State Buildings.
The foundation will also need 100,000 tons of rebar, which is enough steel wire to wrap around the Earth twice.
Each of the four planned fabs will require an amount of structural steel equivalent to the Golden Gate Bridge.
The ceremony also put the politics behind the project on display, particularly over the federal funding that helped make it possible.
Just last year in his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump attacked the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which was the legislative framework paving the way for Micron's move to Central New York.
“Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing,” Trump said, “you should get rid of the CHIP ACT, and whatever is left over, Mr. Speaker, you should use it to reduce debt.”
On Thursday, President Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stood on the bladed ground of the Clay site to champion the project.
“I mean, look at that factory,” he said. “That is sexy.”
Lutnick took credit for Micron's investment in Central New York while downplaying the years of work that went into securing the CHIPS and Science Act, which helped make the project possible.
“This is how we rebuild American industry right here, right now, here in Central New York,” Lutnick said, ”and those bad politicians let it go away.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul framed the milestone as a turning point for a region spending decades looking for economic renewal.
“We're going to get thousands more people hired, create more opportunities for families in this community to be able to stay here and have jobs,” Hochul said.
How the surrounding communities will absorb the project's rapid growth remains one of the biggest questions facing Central New York.
Does the region have enough housing, transportation and infrastructure to support the influx of workers expected over the coming years?
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said the company intends to help address those challenges by investing beyond the semiconductor campus itself.
"We want the community to become a success story too," Mehrotra said. "And that of course includes affordable housing, transportation, and other aspects that we are working with the local leaders on."
Whether Mehrotra's promises can keep pace with the project's rapid growth will remain a focus as construction continues toward a planned 2030 opening for the first phase of the campus.
